This article focuses on political education, a vital but neglected component in histories of education within South Africa's liberation movement in exile during the 1970s and 1980s. The article shows how in conditions of exile the idea of political education as a forward-looking, home-bound form of education was counterposed to a notion of…

Drawing insight and inspiration from our comrade Aziz Choudry, in this paper, we explore the role of political education and knowledge making in social movement struggles to contest the state and capital around access to water and other public services. Drawing on a decade of organising work in the city of Cape Town and at wider scales, we…

Social movements are at the forefront of fighting for another world as conceptualised through Arundhati Roy's portal. COVID-19 and state measures imposed to contend with it have severely impacted not only the activism of movements, but also their capacity to learn. Translocal social movement learning offers one way in which such learning can…

This article reflects on the successes and failures of student protests in transforming higher education in South Africa through a Marxist lens. The slow pace of change by the government in addressing structural and systemic inequalities has led to disgruntlement within the student body. In their quest to hasten the process, students engaged in…

This year sees the release of "London Recruits," a film chronicling the anti-apartheid activism of young men and women volunteers who, from 1967, travelled from the UK to South Africa. The recruits were invaluable to the campaigning work of the African National Congress and the wider international anti-apartheid movement because as white…

This article introduces a research project that works with former Extended Studies Programme students to make knowledge that emerges through online, multimodal collaborations. Knowledge-making is not politically neutral, and the project and article are responding in part to the calls of the 2015/2016 South African student protesters to decolonise…

There is a body of education scholarship in South Africa that captures the role played by social movements in democratising education in post-apartheid South Africa. However, this scholarship says little about how power dynamics affect learning and intellectual labour in social movements or social movement organisations. In addition, the issue of…

In 1994, South Africa's political governance changed from being a White minority-controlled apartheid state to a democracy--a relatively peaceful transition underpinned by a social cohesion and reconciliation ideology, namely, that all (both perpetrators and the oppressed) were victims requiring healing in the new proverbial "rainbow…

Higher education in South Africa is experiencing a time of accelerated change, increasing complexity, contested knowledge claims and inevitable uncertainty. Academia, and by proxy the place which accommodates the academic function, stand central to this debate. The need for a decolonised curriculum on the African continent dates back to the…

As campuses across the world grapple with serving their students during the COVID-19 pandemic and racial justice protests, "Liberal Education" asked educators from a range of institutions about their experiences. These educators offered insights into how the current moment is affecting student well-being and community engagement. They…

The segregation enforced during apartheid has not only ensured widely disparate South African university landscapes, but also framed constructions of activism in historical discourses of racial disenfranchisement and marginalisation. As a result, activism is implicitly and explicitly associated with disadvantaged universities; with black students;…

South African public higher education has been dogged by student protests since 2015. Many of these disruptions raise pertinent issues for the sector, as well as bring about valued awareness and change. Critical scholars have remarked that in every social or political movement, something of pronounced importance is being said -- usually emerging…

This article is based on our two narratives through which we explore how Freirean thought had an impact on our respective praxis as academic activists in apartheid South Africa. We reflect specifically on the influence the work of Freire had on informing and advancing our respective struggles against apartheid education. This article therefore…

Memory politics are often regarded as the "soft" issues contested in the aftermath of political and social upheaval. Yet critical public debates on memory, justice, impunity and reconciliation in South Africa prompted by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) process suggest otherwise. I offer a partial review of some of the key…

This article pays tribute to Allan Luke's work as a pedagogical gift. His ability to bring sociological theories of power, identity and the body to bear on conceptualizing critical literacy is a gift. His research with indigenous populations, and his writing on inclusive curriculum, genres of power and double consciousness resonate in South Africa…